Elfland mislaid

The grand library project has paused for a space, so that negothick and I can go to Pinewoods for a week of folking around.  But what a difference! With some crucial help from derspatchel , I can actually lay hands on most of my books.

In the library, I've pulled my mother's huge beloved pseudo-Jacobean desk away from the wall, so I can walk right round it, consulting shelves.  The room is that much smaller; but access is at least a third greater.  And then—I can't believe I never thought of this before—I realized there's a kneehole on the other side.  (Though the drawers, I think, are a blind.)  If I keep that great dark shining surface clear, I can work from both sides, laying out papers, or doing jigsaw puzzles.  Nice!

All of the hardback and trade paper fiction is alphabetized; all the various non-fictions are clumped by larger subjects.  I have about thirteen running feet of Shakespeare, and I haven't even unboxed the little Yales.  That all looked so pretty—my own micro Folger!—that I took all of the shelves out again, to make headroom for my First Folio fascmile, and brought it down from the living room.

In the course of all this, I found two very long-lost library books in improbable places.  I'd paid a fortune for those, and was refunded.  Yay!  All the library books are now In One Place.

What's still undone in the library:  I can't even get at the bookcase with the smaller paperbacks—all those Ballantines.  They want dusting and ordering.  The non-fiction needs sub-ordering of some sort, by author or LC.  Except that my own categories are cross-LC:  Shakespeare includes works on early modern theatre, dictionaries of the period, works on folklore and food and costume, Will-fiction.   Country life includes books on vernacular architecture and hedgerows; a 1641 farmer's account book; memoirs of shepherding; Dorothy Hartley.  Sun, moon, and stars embraces post-Galilean astronomy, celestial myths and legends, and astrology.  I have collections on Landscape; on Dialect; on Mazes; on Hoaxes.

And one bookcase full of oddities, and old beloved books that I want to take down and read a bit of and perhaps fall into, and shiny new acquistions, and just plain beautiful books.  It's a congeries.  It's a cocktail party, where they all stand around with glasses of Pierian Springs, and sip and sulk and chatter and prophesy.  I keep moving them into new conversations.

Most of my bedroom shelves are like that, but it's a lower-rent party.  No, not cakes and ale:  midnight cocoa.  They're insomnia books, the ones I reach for as the windows grey:  children's classics and Angela Brazil and Sayers and Wodehouse.  Stuff I've read a zillion times.  There's no order whatever, but at least I've dusted them and double-shelved.  The rest of the room is less-read children's books and hideobilia, and I can't get at them at all:  they're buried.

Still haven't dusted the great wall of myth and folklore in the living room.  I actually went out and got an inconspicuous chairside table to get being-read and about-to-be-read-any-month-now books off the floor and all the other chairs.  If you come to tea, you can sit!  You can navigate!

Last, there are three extra-special cases. One is for portfolios and boxed typescripts, with Andy Goldsworthy, and Tudor architecture, and albums of Punch cartoons.  That's where the facsimile First Folio lived all these years.  The second's where I keep archival Nine, and friends' books, and inscribed copies, along with my Lucy Boston and Diana Wynne Jones collections, and another little cocktail party:  for some reason, that's where my Tom Stoppard goes, and Guy Davenport's essays.  And the third—

So I got to the dark oak bookcase on the slant wall.  Byatt, Carter, Crowley, Warner:  all done and dusted.  What wasn't there—O my god—was my precious first edition of Lud-in-the-Mist. No noticeable gap, the dust undisturbed. Total panic.

I took myself firmly in hand, and tried to reconstruct the—not the crime—the mystery.

That's where it's always been:  that shelf. It's not a book I lend. It's not a thing that I'd lose on a bus, like an umbrella.  (It isn't, is it?)  I do have a bad habit of putting things away somewhere very safe and hidden--but surely a dedicated bookcase would be that safe place? My other bad habit is not putting things away at all.  And all along I kept being haunted by—not a memory—a feeling that I'd taken it to Readercon in 2009, that year I was GOH with Hope Mirrlees.  Which I kept dismissing as bizarre.  Why on earth would I do that?  How could I not miss a book like that for six years?

No, it had to be somewhere in the house—but looking for one book in here is like looking for one acorn in the wildwood.  I wrote everyone who'd ever been to tea. Did anyone remember my taking out the book to show them?  Not putting it back?  Any sightings or clues?

It was the_termagant and negothick —blessed among bibliophiles—who had the crucial clue.

They remembered that I did bring the Mirrlees to Readercon.  I what? No, really:  they saw me showing it to Michael Swanwick. I still don't remember doing that—I was on like 19 program items, and it's all a blur—but I reconstructed. Ex ungue leonem. After his tour-de-force GOH interview with a quietly elusive Hope (played, brilliantly, by Marianne Porter), Swanwick and Henry Wessells presented me with a beautiful handbound copy of his Hope-in-the-Mist. A gorgeous iridescent cerise.  Oh, of course!  It's the reading copy that's on the shelf.  I remembered seeing a flash of it, still in tissue, in a box—an aqua milk crate—of Readercon notes that I never got around to putting away afterward, because things got crazy.   I remembered that a stack of similar boxes got shifted out of the library a few years ago to make room for that Jacobean desk.  So I went down to the basement and excavated file boxes, which are not in orderly strata. And there was the aqua Readercon box, fourth back, third down, and there were both books, wrapped carefully together in tissue.

Loud squeals of joy.

Huzzah!

Though in my excitement, I was very nearly a martyr to literature. To get at the aqua box, I had to shift a 3-D jigsaw of very heavy boxes, out and in of a narrow space, and I nearly got brained by a typewriter.


"Too, too Gashlycrumb Tinies," said negothick .

Works for me:

M is for Myrtle, who was caught in a coil
N is for Niney, who was brained by a Roy'l...

Or I could go full Dylan Thomas, and write Under Underwood.

As thankful as I am to have my very dear book back, I am thankfuller not to be a memorial GOH. I'd love to hang out with Hope Mirrlees, but not yet.

Nine